


The Seventh Raven

by Empirate



Series: Familiar [1]
Category: Maleficent (2014), Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin
Genre: Crossover, Fantasy, M/M, Magic, Urban Fantasy, Urban Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 10:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2465669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empirate/pseuds/Empirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Matthew Swift, today is not like any other day. It is the day on which nothing happens and he finally gets to relax and sit down to some curry and a nice hot cuppa.</p><p>Ha! He wishes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **New!** This fic has a playlist! You can listen to it here: http://8tracks.com/tempest27/visitors

The phone rang. In my experience, that had never been a good sign.

We picked up anyway. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mr Mayor! You’re needed at The Tower.”

It was Kelly Shiring. Also never a good sign. 

“What is it? Have the ravens vanished again?” Just thinking about that whole ordeal with the Death of Cities made every muscle and bone in my body ache in phantom memory, and I would have given a good many things never to have to repeat the experience. _  
_

“Well, no. Not exactly. It’s weird.”

“How can ravens ‘not exactly’ disappear? Have they gone on holiday and left a note?”

“No, no. There’s an extra one.”

“An…extra one. Is that bad?”

“We were hoping you would know.”

“How would I know? No one taught me anything about this bloody job! I’ve been figuring it out as I bloody go—“

“See you in half an hour!” Kelly cheerily cut me off, and hung up. 

I stared at the phone in my hand, and considered how badly I would burn myself if I turned it to molten plastic with electric current. 

~

Penny came to the door after I’d rung the doorbell four times. Her hair rather resembled a black, tangled halo. She was wearing track pants, slippers, and a generally ticked-off expression. To be fair, it was supposed to be her day off. 

“Come on, Penny. We’re going to The Tower.”

She gave me a long look, and we couldn’t help but flinch. “Isn’t that more of a Midnight Mayor thing and less of a general sorcerer thing?”

“Yes, and if someone had taught _us_ how to be Midnight Mayor—“

“Nonono, don’t you start on that again! You are _not_ pawning that shite off on me when you die, which could totally be like, any day!”

The sad thing was, Penny was the only person I could conceivably trust with the job, as things stood. But we would have that conversation later. Sometime when I hadn’t just woken her up on her day off. Maybe I’d bring kebabs. 

“Sorcerers still have to know the rules and the agencies and entities that enforce them.”

“You actively ignore all of that.”

“Actively being the key word. I know about them, and I choose to ignore them. But you’re my apprentice, and it’s my responsibility to at least teach you these things so you can make an _educated decision_ to ignore them as well. Besides, this is a rare opportunity.”

“Yeah?”

“Yup. As far as I can tell, there probably aren’t any vague, encroaching forces of mega-mystical chaos attached to this one.”

“…Alright. Give me ten minutes.”

~ 

It being London, we arrived nearly an hour later. The Aldermen had put up a sign out front that declared, a little too cheerily: **Sorry, The Tower of London is closed for a public holiday. Come back tomorrow!** I suspected Kelly was behind this one, as well as the faint deflection spell in the lettering that would be just enough to convince tourists that yes, there really is a British holiday today you twat, you just didn’t do your research properly, and can’t you read the sign? Deflection spells like this one lent themselves particularly well to official signage, because no one argues with signs anyway. 

We walked past the sign and into the inner courtyard where the usual six – and now seven – ravens were milling about on the grass as they always did. (Except for when they didn’t, which was when you worried. But an extra raven? That just seemed like good strategy.) A group of black-clad Aldermen – and I immediately spotted Kelly among them, or rather, she spotted me and was by my side giving me the full briefing just before I’d finished bracing for impact – were spaced at what were probably “strategic” intervals around the lawn with all sorts of techno-magical instruments and expensive equipment thats primary function as far as I could tell was to make them feel more important. 

“…the problem is,” Kelly was saying, “we can’t tell whether this is a mundane happenstance or some portent of magical significance. The Ravenmaster said the day this new raven arrived, he started finding all of the ravens' ID bands broken open and lying about the grounds. Now none of the ravens have bands, and he can't tell all the birds apart without them. So that’s where we were hoping you might have some… _sense_ , in either a sorcerer-highly-in-tune-with-his-city way, or in your official capacity as Midnight Mayor, as to which one of these things is not like the others.”

We blinked. 

Penny took the opportunity to speak up. “Y’know they clip their wings, right? The Tower ravens, I mean. I heard about it on a tour with my parents when I was little.”

We blinked again. Kelly joined in the fun this time. Of course no one had considered the obvious, non-magical solution. 

“Penny, you’re brilliant,” I said.

“No thanks to my teacher,” she said. 

I really couldn’t argue. Instead, I bent down and snatched the nearest raven with the intent of examining its wings.

It gave an indignant squawk, and then its form _rippled_ slightly in my hands, and I immediately let go of the magical bird and gathered what I hoped was enough electricity from the utility mains beneath us to fry it if it should turn into some particularly pissed off and bloodthirsty creature that there would really be no reasoning with. Instead, the raven flapped once, and its wings became the long, black and still feather-irridescent coat of a man, who landed lightly on his feet and whipped around to glare at us.

“ _Excuse me_ ,” he said, crossing his arms, “but that was quite rude! I was having a lovely conversation with Kyrrl here, until you picked me up and dropped me like I bit you – which I very well could have, mind you! But I, for one, have manners.”

“Erm,” I said.

I let the power fall from my hands to slither back down through the stone slabs and race once more through the mains. The man’s/raven’s eyes followed it with extreme interest, and the irritation was completely gone in seconds. It was replaced, instead, with something suspiciously similar to the look birds get when they spot something shiny. 

I tried speech again, and found that it was indeed still an action of which I was capable. “Sorry for dropping you,” I said, and offered my hand, for a lack of anything better to do. 

When he hesitated, looking slightly affronted again, I sighed, took of my glove, and offered it again. He shook it with a toothy smile, which quickly turned to a frown as he kept hold of my hand and looked down at the deep gashes of the twin crosses on my palm that never quite healed. It was while he was examining my hand that I noticed his face was lined with systematic scars of his own, sweeping down his neck and disappearing under his shirt – the fault lines where his bones and flesh restructured themselves when he changed form, I guessed – and the whole thing didn’t feel quite as awkwardly drawn-out as it probably looked.

“That’s alright,” he said. “You’re not the first to make the mistake, although there’s really no excuse to handle a bird that way.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Penny interrupted, “but this means we’re _not_ in danger of gory injury or city-wide destruction, right?”

“Probably not from a shapeshifter,” I said.

“Oh no, I’m not a shapeshifter,” the man laughed. “Well, I guess I am  _technically_ , but I really _am_ a raven. Just…among other things. It’s a long story.” He scrutinised me more carefully, in the way that is perfectly normal for animals and incredibly uncomfortable for the rest of us. “What about you? Are you a fairy?”

“A…fairy?” we repeated.

“Well, what with the magic and the wings and all,” he said. 

That took us by surprise. Not many creatures could see our wings if we didn’t want them to. 

“I’m a sorcerer…among other things,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

“Oh, don’t let him give you any of that cryptic bollocks,” Penny chimed in. “He’s also the Blue Electric Angels, the Midnight Mayor, and kind of a git when he hasn’t been fed properly.”

“But generally a nice guy!” Kelly came to my aid.

“And his name’s Matthew,” Penny continued, a strange tone of amusement and something else that we couldn’t place in her voice. 

“Just Matthew?” the raven asked.

“What?”

“I mean, just Matthew’s fine, I’m just Diaval. I was only asking because I hear everyone has two names now.”

“…Swift. My name is Matthew Swift.”

“Oh, I knew a swift once! Killed herself flying into a window, poor thing. Swifts really aren’t the brightest birds. It only took me one go to figure out glass.”

Penny snorted.

“How long have you been a bird?” I asked, suspecting that I already knew the answer.

“Oh, some time now. It’s just so much easier than being a human. Especially these days, form what I hear.”

“We'd be inclined to agree,” we said. “Did you vandalise all the Tower ravens' ID bands?”

The raven named Diaval ran his fingers through his black hair sheepishly. “Well, my lord, they told me the little bracelets were getting on their nerves...”

“Honorifics are uncalled for, I assure you,” I interrupted glumly.

“But she said you were a Mayor, and you said ‘we,’ when you were talking about yourself just then, so I just assumed…”

“Those are all different things,” I gritted, resisting the urge to bury my face in my hand. “Just call me Matthew.”

“Alright,” Diaval said.

“What sort of a name is Diaval?" I asked. "It sounds very…classic magic.” 

“Is there something wrong with classic magic? From what I’ve seen, urban magic seems pretty inelegant to me.”

“In…elegant?”

“Oh no,” Penny said. 

“In _elegant_? Have you seen neon arc in a thousand colours at your fingertips? Have you felt the vital life-pulse of the city during rush hour? Have you heard the wind of the Underground wail as it fills your mind with the endless, circular rumble of the trains and the footsteps of their passengers? Have you tasted the lingering ghost of the old city smog on the air, or run your fingers along a wall and read all of its stories, layered over with time and life and memory? Have you walked with the fucking shadows in the unstoppable tide of life and history, knowing you could be swept away and lost if your step falters, because they are not your steps, but the steps of every  Londoner that came before, and the very _heartbeat_ of the city itself?” 

“I…can’t say that I have,” Diaval admitted. 

We caught our breath a little. 

“But have _you_ ever done classic magic?”

“…No.”

“Well then, I guess neither of us has a right to judge.”

Bugger all.  Penny and Kelly were both snickering, though Kelly at least had the professionalism and decency to try and fail to contain it. 

“How about I talk to the raven, and you two go over and keep the Aldermen entertained so they don’t realise how useless they are,” I said, in my best ‘I’m-not-suggesting-I’m-ordering’ voice, which was usually heeded about twenty percent of the time, on a good day.  

“But I’m your apprentice,” Penny pouted.

“And I’m your PA,” Kelly complained.

“And you’ve both seen plenty of ravens before, and so have I, and I think we can handle just one. So shoo.”

Penny frowned, but she took Kelly’s hand and dragged her off to where the other Aldermen were standing and awkwardly shifting their weight waiting to be told whether or not they could go home. I really do love my apprentice sometimes.

We turned our attention back to the raven. “Now if it were up to me I would just send you off with a ‘happy holiday, don’t mess with any mega-mystic forces while you’re here,’ but the Aldermen won’t be happy unless I give them something to file. So can I ask you a few questions?”

“Fine by me.”

 “You’re from the countryside, then?”

“Well, everywhere was countryside when I hatched into this world. Unless you lived in one of the castle towns, but those were not nice places.”

“...You're saying you're from the past?”

“Mhmm. Well, it’s not like I time traveled here or anything, I’ve just lived a really long time because of an old enchantment of eternal servitude that was placed upon me, and when my Mistress died, there was just the eternal bit left.”

“Oh. That's alright then, I guess. Time travel is usually a full investigation involving a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Mostly blood. Next question: what brings you to London? And The Tower of, specifically?”

Apparently Diaval had to think about this. “Well I’ve always wanted to chat with the famous ravens of The Tower. It seemed like they would have to be such cultured birds, being around so many people from all over the world every day. And they don’t disappoint! But you're asking why now, right? And I have to say, I really don’t know. I guess I just felt…drawn here.”

Oh no. No bloody way. “Drawn? Do you mean in a mystical way, or more in a ‘Paris has been nice for a couple centuries but now I see through its overpriced sidewalk cafes and outdated renaissance culture to how boring and shit it is as a city, and oh, I know, maybe I should try London’ kind of way?”

“Mystical, I’m afraid,” Diaval said cautiously. “But nothing too strong. Just a kind of…soft calling.”

“Yeah, but see, London doesn’t call for tourists, it calls for help. But if it really was London calling, then why didn’t it call me? It’s my bloody job to protect this city.”

Diaval giggled. _Giggled_. “You said ‘London calling’ and it totally worked in context. Man, I miss The Clash.”

“Don’t we all. Can we focus on the ominous mystical calling, or do you have the attention span of a bird too?”

“Oi, ravens are the smartest birds!”

“Yes, and that’s what makes them…complicated. Magically. I prefer pigeons.”

“Who prefers pigeons to ravens? Pigeons are disgusting – no sense of personal hygiene.”

“I can’t scry though ravens.”

Diaval looked appalled. “Well that's just borderline unethical.”

“That's nothing we haven't been accused of before. And you’ve sidetracked us again. Were you the only one called?”

“That I know of… No, wait, I met a couple sprites on my way into town. And I thought I saw a manticore, but it might have just been a large dog. It’s hard to judge proportions when everything’s bigger than you. This isn’t good, is it?”

“Probably not. Not with our luck, anyway. Kelly!”

Kelly, whose eyes probably never left us while she was pretending to be critically involved in Alderman business with her coworkers, was by my side instantly. Penny was quick to follow.

“It looks like the Aldermen have something to do after all,” I told her reluctantly.

“Let me guess,” Penny said, “there are vague, encroaching forces of mega-mystical chaos.”

“That _is_ essentially the job description,” Kelly agreed. 

I told them what Diaval had told me, and while Penny still seemed skeptical about the whole thing, Kelly had fallen into her serious Alderman mode, already planning and contingency planning for the next 24 hours. 

“First we have to figure out why London’s sending out a distress signal, and why it only seems to be calling to mystical creatures, or if that’s even what’s happening here at all,” I said. 

Everyone looked at me expectantly. 

“I meant ‘we’ collectively!” I growled. “I’m not doing this on my own this time!”

Kelly cleared her throat sheepishly. “Right, of course. It’s just that…you’re always so good at the reconnaissance piece…”

I stared at her, disbelieving. “You have access to every CCTV camera in the city.”

“Yes, but somehow you always manage to find the trouble before we do. Or it finds you. It’s remarkably more efficient that way, as long as you keep the destruction of public property to a minimum, and I keep writing in your reports that you really should try to improve in that area.”

“…Fine,” I said. “We’ll do the reconnaissance bit, but the Aldermen had better be ready to back us up with all of your shiny automatic weapons. I’m not in the mood for my normal routine of nearly dying facing off against the city’s doom in a form that is always bigger, nastier and less squishy than me.”

“Don’t worry, Mr Mayor,” Kelly said, as if I had just expressed the minor concern that I might have left the kettle on this morning. “Just say the word. We’ll be ready.”

“Alright, Penny, raven, you’re with me.”

“Us?” Diaval asked, surprised.

“I said bloody _‘we’_ didn’t I?” I said as I turned and trudged back the way we’d come. 

I heard Diaval whisper to Penny behind me, _“That switching pronouns thing is incredibly confusing.”_ To which she replied, in an even less subtle whisper,  _“Yeah, but he’s really stubborn about it. It’s like, his thing. I think if he tried to stop he’d just confuse_ himself. _You get used to it.”_

They both caught up to me at a jog as we left The Tower. “So do you wear that long coat just so it looks cooler and less like a temper tantrum when you storm away from people?” Penny asked.

“You know why I wear this coat, and you should really find a good camouflaging coat of your own.”

“Yeah, but the thing is, coats like that are like fashion black holes. They just swallow it all up.”

Diaval chuckled.

“It’s not about fashion,” I complained. “It’s about protection.”

Penny ignored me. “Now Diaval’s coat on the other hand. Very nice. You should give Matthew some pointers.”

“Alright,” I said, “new rule: no hitting on the raven until we figure out what's going on with London. Got it?”

“But you started it.”

I stopped. Penny nearly ran into me. “Why would you think…?” I trailed off, bewildered. 

“I mean, yeah, you’ve got a pretty skewed emotional spectrum, what with the two extremes being well-fed and divine wrath, so it’d be hard to tell the difference if we didn’t practically live together,” Penny continued, “but most of the time, you just look at people like we’re insignificant. Or a nuisance, if we especially distinguish ourselves. Except, you don’t look at him like that.”

Her words hurt. But mostly because I knew they were true. My humanity, or possible lack thereof, was a sensitive subject. I was even going to a not-so-anonymous support group. “I… We…” I looked to Diaval, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Forget it, we have important shit to deal with.” 

I began walking again, and the two of them followed, albeit at a distance and in uncomfortable silence. I knew Penny hadn’t meant what she’d said to hit so hard. She was always brutally honest, which I secretly appreciated most of the time. It kept our sight clear. But what bothered me the most was the fact that I was trying so hard to be a decent guy – a decent _human being_ – and still, apparently, failing miserably. Being constantly at war with mystical forces of darkness had probably skewed my own self-perception, since I had little else to compare myself to. Or at least, that’s what Sharon would probably say. 

I had been so caught up in my own thoughts that my feet had gone off and done their own thing, falling into the rhythm of the city and, apparently, following the path of the old city wall into Islington. It was only when I heard whispers from behind me again that I had the presence of mind to break from the rhythm and let it carry on without me so that I could walk once more of my own accord. 

_“Does he know where he’s going?”_ Diaval whispered. _“That guy couldn’t get lost in London if he tried,”_ Penny reassured him. 

“Not getting lost and knowing where I’m going are two different things,” I said over my shoulder, startling them both. “This is a test, Penny. Where would you start with this investigation?”

Penny thought for a moment. Eventually, she turned to look at Diaval. I had taught her well. 

“Well, you’re the one who had the weird feeling, right?” she asked him. “So can’t you just do like a ‘warmer/colder’ thing?”

“I think I could do that,” Diaval said. “But the feeling was stronger when I was a bird.”

Penny’s gaze didn’t change.

“Oh, right. I’ll just change on command for you, then. Because you’re my Mistress and we’ve made a covenant, right? Because that’s how I usually operate, so it’d be pretty weird if suddenly I _wasn’t_ doing that.”

Penny’s look became more threatening. I was beginning to worry that my sour mood had infected everyone.

“Fine, fine,” Diaval said. “But I’ll have you know I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart.” There was a flutter of coat and a flurry of feathers, and a second later, a raven was standing in the place of the near-six-foot-tall man.

I looked around to see if anyone had seen this slightly-stranger-than-the-normal-strangeness-of-London-streets occurrence, but there was no one around. There was never anyone around in this part of Islington. 

Diaval ruffled his feathers and looked ready to take off, but I told him to wait. He looked at me and cocked his head to the side while I quickly removed the SIM card from my mobile and a piece of string from my coat (suffering the loss of yet another button), and kneeled down to tie the card around the bird’s ankle with minimal protest on his part. 

“I can keep track of you with that,” I explained, feeling only slightly ridiculous talking to a bird. “I don’t want to end up following some random raven all over the city.” 

Diaval shrugged his wings in a very human way, hopped once, and took off into the sky with a loud _caw_. After flying in circles a few times above the rooftops, he began to fly westward, and we followed below. 

The feeling was, apparently, not that strong even while he was a bird. Diaval would set off confidently in one direction, only to stop, fly in a few more circles, then start again in a different direction, and often the complete opposite one. We crossed the Thames over Blackfriars Bridge, only to cross right back again over Waterloo Bridge. Penny complained that she had been planning to go to the gym later today and that now she had lost all motivation. We were used to this kind of thing, but still, London as the crow flies is very different from scampering about down alleyways, ‘round roundabouts, through crowded shopping centres and across busy streets whirring with London drivers – one of the most vicious and dangerous creatures we had faced in London _before_ the city introduced the congestion charge. 

We were beginning to devise ways of shocking the bird with the SIM card to get his attention when the city fell away into grass and trees and little paved paths that some tosser somewhere would probably call “quaint,” and we found ourselves in Hyde Park. Diaval spiraled downwards and landed, rather surprisingly, on my shoulder. Before Penny could crack a pirate joke, however, Diaval _cawed_ loudly again, this time right next to my ear.

“Ow,” I said, cringing. 

The raven held out his leg and I dutifully removed my makeshift tracking device. Then he hopped once, flapped his wings, and in a rush of black feathers and magic that I could never quite catch the mechanics of each time he did it, turned back into a man. 

“Sorry about that,” he said, at least having the decency to look guilty. “I forget people can’t speak raven sometimes.”

“What were you yelling at Matthew about, then?” Penny asked. 

“I think it’s here, in the park,” Diaval said. “Whatever it is we’re looking for.”

“The park is rather big,” I pointed out. The figure of 600 acres surfaced vaguely in my memory.

“Well it’s better than the entire city of London,” Diaval said defensively. “And the focus has gotten weaker again. I'll find it, I just need to walk around a bit.”

Hyde Park was a large piece of land smack in the middle of London that had never been paved over and swallowed by the urban sprawl. It was far from what a tour book might call “pristine natural beauty,” but it had stayed green in some form or another through the centuries as London grew up around it. It had been the hunting grounds and garden estates of kings and queens, and it had been the site of exhibitions and ceremonies that had changed London’s course through history. It was filled with its own, tense magic, and it was entirely possible that something in it had finally begun to act out.  

“If this is where the call is coming from, then shouldn’t there be loads of mystical creatures around?” Penny asked.

“Yes,” we answered. “But if they’ve survived this long, it’s because they are very discreet. We probably won’t see them. Still, I’ll call Kelly and have her close off the park. We don’t want a clueless little kid provoking a water elemental by throwing a penny into it.” 

I made the call, but as I was finishing explaining everything to Kelly, I felt a tug on my sleeve.

“Um, Matthew?” Diaval said, not looking quite at me, but at something behind me. “It was definitely a manticore that I saw earlier.”

Slowly, Penny and I turned. About twenty metres away, among the the trees behind us, was a creature the size of a small truck, its scimitar-like claws kneading the soil and its long, scorpion tail swishing silently through the air. Its eyes were fixed on us.

“Kelly,” I hissed into the phone, “what do you do with manticores?”

_“There are manticores?”_

“Yes, and this one looks hungry.”

_“Well, that’s weird. I mean, manticores aren’t really_ urban _creatures normally, so…yeah, I haven’t been trained on manticores._   _I can forward you the relevant documents from our archives...”_

“Never mind. Just get here as soon as possible and be prepared for man-eating mystical beasts.”

_“Yes, Mr Mayor! We’re on our way.”_

I hung up. Kelly had sounded disturbingly excited. 

“The Aldermen are coming,” I said.

“Yeah? And do you suppose this manticore is going to wait politely for them to show up? What are we supposed to do in the meantime?” Penny hissed. 

“In the meantime, I suggest we run,” I said, and, grabbing Penny’s and Diaval’s hands, we did just that. 

I heard the manticore roar, and start bounding after us, so I pulled left and we were running through the trees, at least slowing the creature down if we couldn’t lose it. Like Kelly, Bakker hadn’t bothered to teach me anything about manticores, because you never saw them in cities. In fact, no one was sure there were even any left in the world. No one except, now, for Penny, Diaval and myself, who were currently running from some very compelling evidence. 

If we weren’t so deep into one of the bloody biggest parks in London it would have been an easy fight, but here there was little to fight with. Still, we let go of Diaval’s and Penny’s hands once we were satisfied that they had got the running idea, so that we could begin drawing as much power as we could from the electric-but-made-to-look-like-gas lamps sprinkled throughout the park that were just starting to come on with the dusk. The lamps in the immediate vicinity blinked out again, and electricity arced into our hands, dancing and sparking around our fingers and making the hairs on the back of our neck stand on end. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to kill a human, so hopefully it would do significant damage to a manticore. All I had to do was aim, which meant turning around…

“Matthew, get rid of the electricity!” Diaval yelled from beside me.

“What? Why?” we demanded.  


“Because it can follow us from our scent, so we’re going to run through that fountain up there, and I don’t want to get electrocuted!”

The raven had a point, which did nothing to ease my frustration as I let the beautiful, powerful current run back to the lamps and drain away, leaving us feeling vulnerable and mortal once more. 

Several things happened in quick succession over the next few moments, and I only had time to process them after the fact. The last of the electricity left me just as we came to the large, shallow fountain, and there was a curious shimmer across the surface of the water just before Diaval and I took our first splashing step into it. Our feet did not touch the bottom of the fountain, which appeared to be no more than ten centimetres beneath the surface, but instead kept falling rapidly, throwing us both off-balance and we flailed, head-first, into the fountain. In the split-second before I was submerged, still without having touched the bottom, I heard Penny, who had been a step behind us, yell _“Shit!”_ and begin running around the fountain without following us in. A smart decision, given that it seemed likely that Diaval and I would drown in the next few minutes if we kept falling through the mysterious depths of the ten-centimetre-deep fountain. 

The good news was we didn’t drown. The bad news might have outweighed the good.

We were pulled down through more and more shimmering water, and then there was a strange lurching sensation that felt like nausea and gravity had teamed up to twist my guts into intricate double helices, and then we resurfaced in the middle of a large lake in the middle of a much larger forest, that was most definitely not London. 

Diaval came up, spluttering, beside me. “Did we…provoke one of those…water elementals you were talking about earlier?” he asked while hacking up lungfuls of lake water. 

“No,” I said, looking around for the closest shore and paddling in that direction with as much dignity as I could muster while my heavy, waterlogged coat worked against me every step of the way. 

“That was some kind of magic portal,” I said, once we’d reached the shore. “And a really powerful one at that. It may be that whatever was calling to you and the other mystical creatures was coming from here.”

While I took off my coat and tried hopelessly to wring it out, Diaval turned into a large, black wolf and proceeded to shake off all the water. And while I couldn’t possibly have gotten any wetter, Diaval was certainly not helping. He bared his teeth at me in what we took to be a grin, then suddenly transformed back into a man. A man who was no longer smiling.

“I know this forest,” he said slowly, looking around again, but this time more carefully, critically, in the way one might examine an old photograph. “This is…home.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic will be slow in updating, but I swear I'm gonna finish it.

“Where are we?” I asked Diaval, almost dreading the answer. 

“We’re actually in the exact same place,” he said, still looking around with a fondness for our rural surroundings that we did not share, “just…a couple thousand years earlier.”

“So we time traveled? Do you remember what I said about time travel? About all of the blood usually involved?”  


“It can’t be that bad,” Diaval said. 

“Time travel is really powerful magic! _We_ can only do it by half-measures and under the right circumstances, and we’re one of the most powerful magicians I know! Except here, where the nearest city is probably ancient Rome, I’m about as useful as…” – there was a small, furry creature of some kind currently chewing on the side of my shoe out of a likely obligation to its existence as a small, furry creature – “that thing.”

Diaval looked down at the creature and took a reflexive step back. “Actually, those are quite venomous.” 

He transformed back into the black wolf and growled ferociously at the little thing, and I stiffened, afraid it would attempt to take refuge up my trouser leg. Mercifully, it scampered away, and I let out the breath I’d been holding. 

“Wonderful. I’m _less_ useful than the venomous little rodent.” 

I could sense the vibrant magic of life here, exponentially higher than in the modern English countryside, but it was so different and wild that I could get no grasp of it. The effort felt like trying to pull an old and deeply-rooted tree from the earth. 

Diaval was human once again, and seemed to be enjoying himself far too much in our opinion.  “It’s alright, I can protect you here until we figure out how to get back.”

I might have whimpered upon realisation of the fact that I now needed protection from a raven. 

“Oh, come on, the enchanted forest in the Moors is really lovely if you give it a chance. And if you aren’t stupid enough to provoke anything. I didn’t realise just how much I missed this place…”

It was difficult, but I was briefly able to imagine myself in his shoes, where this forest was to him as London was to me, and I felt…guilty. All I could think about was getting back home as soon as possible, but Diaval was home now. 

“So…London was built over an enchanted forest?” I asked.

“You didn’t know that, Mister ‘I am the city’?”

“Well there is no bloody city yet, is there?” I said, quickly getting panicky and frustrated again.

“Oh god, please don’t start on that again,” Diaval groaned. “I promise you’ll be alright. We’ll figure out how to get back to London soon, and in the meantime, you’ve got the best local guide you could wish for.”

“Thank you,” I sighed. “I’m…sorry. We just hate feeling weak. It’s like not being able to breathe.”

“Wow, you might have some more serious issues than just getting home,” Diaval said.

“We have many issues. But we function.”

Diaval laughed. I hadn’t thought it was all that funny until he laughed, and then I realised it was rather hilarious. 

“So do you have any ideas of how we can get back?” Diaval asked. “Like, couldn’t we just swim to the bottom of the lake and back through the portal?”

“The portal wouldn’t be at the bottom – it would be on the surface. Did you notice that shimmer across the surface of the fountain before we fell in?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it.”

“That was the portal. And the shimmer’s gone.”

Diaval thought for a moment. “You said you weren’t aware of anyone in London who could make that portal, right? So that means someone here probably made it, doesn’t it?”

“Probably. Which means we could find that person, and they could recreate the portal,” I said, catching on. “I don’t like the idea of confronting someone with enough power to make a portal like that, especially in my current state, but who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be a nice little old witch who accidentally opened up a portal through time during a freak pie-baking accident, and she’ll kindly clear all this mess up as soon as we inform her of her error. And she’ll send us back to London with pie.”

Diaval cocked his head to the side, birdlike, and said, “Yeah, you’ve got issues. But maybe not all bad ones.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “But thanks. Do you still feel that calling from earlier?”

“Um,” Diaval said, and the next second he was a raven, flapping about in a wide circle before he became the large black wolf again, prowling the same circle around me and sniffing the air. I tried not to be nervous. 

“It’s a lot weaker again,” he said, having transformed behind me and giving me a start. “But it’s coming from the direction of the castle, in the human kingdom.”

“Is that…bad?” I hazarded, trying to read Diaval’s tone.

“That depends on when exactly we’ve landed ourselves,” Diaval said. “The forest isn’t dark and oppressive, so this is either before my Mistress’ wings were taken, or after the Moors and the human kingdom were united under Princess Aurora. I really hope it’s after. Things were much better after.”

There was much that I wanted Diaval to explain in that statement, but I thought it was best to focus on one thing at a time. “Do you have any idea who might have created the portal? Or why?”

“None. My Mistress was the most powerful fairy in the Moors, and if she could create a portal back through time, she would have. And she wouldn’t have needed me.”

“Then we just keep following whatever’s calling you.”

“That does seem like our only option,” Diaval agreed reluctantly, though whether over leaving the forest, or going to the town, I couldn’t tell. “But you can’t be seen by people looking like that,” he said, looking me up and down. “Everything you’re wearing won’t be invented for another thousand years at least.”

Diaval’s form flickered slightly, and his clothing changed from black loafers, black slacks, a black button-up and a black overcoat to rough black trousers stuffed into black leather boots, a very low-cut black tunic and a long, black leather coat that carried the strange, subtle iridescence of the previous one. A few feathers drifted to the ground at his feet. 

“This is the time period we’re going for,” he said. “And luckily, I know some of the best tailors in the land. You can come out, mates!” he called to no one in particular. “It’s alright, this human’s nice…for the most part.”

After a few seconds, tiny faces began to appear from behind the trees around us. Some looked more or less human, while others closer resembled various insects, amphibians and reptiles, but they all hovered cautiously into the clearing on insect- or bird-like wings, and they all had their attention fixed on me.

“It’s alright, really,” Diaval said to them. “He’s not going to hurt any of you.”

That seemed to be their cue to suddenly mob me and begin poking curiously at my ribs and cheeks and hair, flitting about like a swarm and chattering excitedly about the “stranger.” It was a good thing I couldn’t use magic just then, because we might have shocked them all like a bug zapper out of reflex. 

“Guys! Guys! Calm down,” Diaval said sternly. “That’s not how you greet a human.”

The swarming calmed, and the little creatures – an old breed of fairy, I realised – looked disappointed. I tried not to appear too relieved. 

“Hi,” I tried. “I’m Matthew.”

“That’s a funny name,” one of them said.

“Shhh, Saravim!” said another. “It’s probably normal for a human.”

“Are you part fairy?” a third asked.

“Um, no,” I said. 

“But you have wings,” another chimed in, “so you can’t be human.”

“We’re not…entirely…” I felt incredibly out of place here, and their perceptive scrutiny made us uncomfortable.

“You don’t have to answer their twenty questions,” Diaval said, coming to my rescue. “But I have a question I’d like you all to answer. We’re actually from a ways in the future. Would you mind telling us what time this is, and…who the monarch is?” 

“The future? How exciting!” a fairy resembling a fiery butterfly said. “It is the forty-second year of Queen Aurora’s reign. I know she’d love to see you, Diaval, but we’re in the second half of the year, when she reigns from the human kingdom.” 

“Thank you, Aixa, that’s where we’re going, so we’ll be sure to pay her a visit. She might even be able to help us.” There was a slight undercurrent of sadness in his voice that we didn’t understand, and that we were sure the bubbly fairies didn’t notice.

"Have you seen any other creatures come through that portal?" I asked.

"You're the only ones who came through," Aixa said. "There was nothing there until just before you appeared."

"Diaval, do you think all of this was just meant for you?" I asked.

He looked troubled. "I can't imagine why, but it is looking that way. Still, we only have one lead. I’d like to ask one more favour of you all,” Diaval addressed the fairies.

There was enthusiastic assent from the fairies. They seemed to hold Diaval in high regard. 

“We need some clothes for Matthew to wear in town so he doesn’t look so funny,” Diaval said.

The fairies giggled. 

“Think you can manage it?”

“Of course, Diaval!” they chimed, and they all zoomed away, returning a few seconds later with arms full of fabrics, scissors, needles and thread. They began swarming around me again, some taking measurements and shouting them to others who were busy fashioning articles of clothing in midair.

“I feel like I’m in a Disney princess movie,” I groaned.

“Do not get me started on those,” Diaval said. 

I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he personally had against Disney movies before the fairies finished their work with the speed of chipmunks on a great deal of caffeine. They held up a pair of dark trousers, brown leather boots, a dark blue tunic and a long, dark brown wool coat. I realised with a sinking feeling that I would have to abandon my enchanted coat for the new one. Not that the enchantments would do me any good here – that coat would make me stand out here no matter what, like Diaval said – but I had grown attached to the thing. I’d always had the nagging suspicion that it would outlive me. 

I accepted the garments with a forced smile and changed into them quickly, giving the fairies my old ones in return, which they seemed quite excited to receive. I felt ridiculous.

“Good job, mates!” Diaval praised. “He actually looks respectable now.”

“Clothing is not what makes someone worthy of respect,” I said irritably.

“Maybe not, but it gets you some anyway,” Diaval shrugged. “Why _were_ you dressed so rattily before?”

“It’s necessary. Stuff to do with magic. Blending into the city, etcetera.”

“Well…couldn’t you blend in with the business people? Wear a suit or something?”

We almost laughed at the idea. “Not the kinds of places we end up.”

“If you say so. I was just thinking…you’d probably look kind of… _nice_ in a suit.”

I chose to take the comment at face value. “Thanks. But suits are the Aldermen’s department. As you can probably tell already, I do most of the legwork while they get some kind of masochistic thrill out of doing piles of paperwork, particularly when it’s filing incident reports on me.”

“I did kind of get that impression,” Diaval said. “But I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You’re too kind.”

“It’s two days’ ride to the castle,” Diaval said. “We’d better get going, unless you want to wait here and let London build itself around us.”

“We don’t have horses,” I pointed out, rather stupidly in retrospect.

“Nope. Just one.” And in a flurry of feathers, there was suddenly a large, black horse where Diaval had stood. 

He nudged my elbow and gave a short huff as if to say, _“Well? Get on with it, then.”_

I knew nothing about horses. In fact, they rather terrified me. But I at least trusted Diaval not to suddenly kick my skull in or throw me off for no reason, so I forced myself to clamber on, albeit with no grace whatsoever. Diaval snorted again, and this time it sounded like a laugh. 

“Oh, shut up,” I said, and gave him a warning kick to the ribs.

With that, he took off at full gallop. I might have made an embarrassingly high-pitched sound, but I was pretty sure the wind swept it away before it reached Diaval’s ears. 

Trees whipped by as we skirted the large lake, and soon fell away into open fields. The terror of riding on the back of a large, galloping horse did not so much subside as become the new baseline to which I grew accustomed after about an hour, during which time we passed a few little stone cottages, and our speed did not significantly decrease. At least I didn’t have to worry about steering – I was just along for the ride. Literally. 

After I got over my initial panic, I noticed that the fur I was so desperately clutching was actually closer to feathers, and indeed there were some larger black feathers interspersed with the down-like rest of it. It was strange and soft, and we couldn’t resist running our hand through it. Diaval didn’t seem to mind, so we continued the soothing (for us) motion for the rest of the ride until Diaval decided it was time to stop for supper. 

We had talked about how we would get food. Diaval could always hunt and scavenge, but we were damned if we were going to die millennia in the past from something as stupid and inane as eating improperly cooked meat or a poisonous berry. So Diaval had said we should stop at a farmhouse and ask to share a meal as guests. I imagined knocking on the door of a random London flat and asking for food, and then I imagined the door being slammed in my face. I nearly laughed. 

But Diaval seemed convinced that it would work. There was just the one hitch remaining that to a local farmer either one of us would look incredibly suspicious. I had my unnatural eyes, which were easy enough to live with in London when few took the time to notice such things, and those that did lived in a time in which coloured contacts had been invented. But if Diaval went in without me, it would seem strange that a traveler was this far afield without a horse. And besides, I was the one who needed the meal, so I would have to be the one to go in. 

I knocked on the door of the farmhouse, and was greeted by an elderly man with a scruffy white beard and a face smudged with dirt. 

I said what Diaval had told me to say. “I’m very sorry to trouble you, but I’m traveling into town and I’ve come quite a distance already. I was wondering if you would be so kind as to share some of your food with me.”

“O-of course,” the man said politely, but he was staring rather obviously. “I’m sorry, it’s just– Your eyes, they’re… You’re not some kinda sorcerer, are you?”

I blinked. “Sorry?”

His voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “There’ve been rumours, you know, of men beginning to practice magic now that the kingdoms are united…”

It was clear that the idea scared him, so I again grudgingly repeated Diaval’s words. “Ah, no, I’m not a sorcerer. I’m actually…half fairy. My mother. But I can’t do any magic.” That part was true at least, for now. 

“I see,” the man said, relaxing. “I hope you’ll forgive my being rude, but a man’s gotta look after his own out here. Please come in. I was just making stew.”

“Thank you. And might I trouble you for some feed for my horse as well?”

“Of course, of course.” He went inside and I saw him retrieve a burlap bag and fill it with grains from a small barrel. “Here you are,” he said, handing it to me. “You feed your horse while I put the food on the table.”

I went around the side to where I had hitched Diaval (for pretence, I assured him with a grin), and offered him the bag. He snorted at me, but I heard him start eating as I turned back to the house.  

The inside of the farmhouse was humble, but still probably more spacious than the average London flat. I sat down awkwardly at the small table as the man placed a bowl of stew in front of me and one in front of himself. There were no spoons in sight. I felt a little like I imagined Diaval must with his head in the feed bag, following the man’s lead and drinking the stew from the bowl. 

“So,” the man said, wiping stew from his beard with his sleeve, “what business is it you got in town, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“We’re hoping to find a job at the castle.”

“We?” the man asked.

Nosy humans picking apart everything we say. “Er, my horse and I. Cavalry.”

“Royal guard, eh?”

“Yes.”

“A plum job, that. We’ve had peace for over forty years, and there doesn’t look to be any trouble stirring up any time soon.”

“I still hope I can be useful to the Queen,” or rather, I hoped the Queen would be useful to us, as Diaval had suggested. 

“I’ll never understand why men choose town life over the beautiful countryside. Things are a lot simpler out here. Hard work mind you, but easier on the soul.”

“I can’t say I disagree with you there. But towns have their own magic.”

“Well if they do, I don’t see it. Just a lota people crammed into a little space an’ everybody walkin’ all over each other.”

“Yeah. But I couldn’t live anywhere else.” 

~

We were riding again by sunset. Riding in the dark was even more terrifying than during the day, and I thought I might throw up and waste all of our effort on getting me fed. Luckily I got used to the feeling more quickly this time, and the contents of my stomach more or less stayed put. 

Diaval stopped again several hours later when we reached a small copse of trees. Finally, he transformed back into a man. I had so many questions for him that I couldn’t very well ask while he was busy being a horse. 

“We should sleep in the trees,” Diaval said, already beginning to climb. “There are predators at night. And worse, highwaymen.”

I clambered up after him, rather proud of my first attempt at climbing a tree. It was a great old tree, with branches as thick as industrial beams. 

“Use these to tie yourself to the branch, or you might fall off in your sleep and break your neck.” Diaval, from his neighbouring but higher branch tossed down two long strips of sturdy fabric from the bag of provisions that the fairies had supplied us with. Most of the stuff had seemed pretty useless, but my opinion had included the strips of fabric at the time. I noticed that Diaval wasn’t using any of the fabric himself.

“Diaval,” I said, “please tell me more about this place. We feel very…lost.”

“The funny thing is, you already know this place. And I’m not talking about the Moors being where London will be built. You know this land from one of your old stories.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’d laugh if I told you.”

“Try us.”

“Alright,” Diaval sighed. “You know Sleeping Beauty?”

“The…story.”

“The true story. About the life of Queen Aurora. Though I first met her when she was a princess.”

Well, it wasn’t the craziest thing we’d heard. Crazier things, in fact, had come out of our own mouth, even barring the time we were forcibly put on deadly psychotropic drugs.

“Was she your Mistress?”

“No, my Mistress was the fairy Maleficent.”

“The villain? The one who turns into a dragon?”

“She always got the credit for that one.”

“You mean you…?”

“Of course I was the dragon. I was the one she was turning into all sorts of animals, after all. You know, I couldn’t change at will at first; it was all completely at her command. But before she died, she gave me control over it. When she knew she wouldn’t need me anymore. Since then, I’ve been an independent contractor of sorts. I don’t really have any long-term objectives of my own, but when I come across someone whose objectives I agree with to whom I might be useful, I lend them my services.”

“Why would you want another Master after Maleficent?”

“She wasn’t a villain, like everyone thinks. She went through a dark place, but she pulled herself out of it and ended up doing great things.” Diaval proceeded to retell the old story to me from his perspective. 

“It was kind of funny,” he concluded. “Part of her curse was that Princess Aurora would be beloved by all who met her. It didn’t occur to my Mistress that she herself would be included.”

We found we could empathise with the real Maleficent a great deal. “Classic magic is full of pitfalls like that. Another reason we dislike it.”

Diaval transformed into a large, black snake and flicked his long tongue out at me. I understood the human gesture. Then Diaval curled himself snugly around the tree branch and seemed to settle in for the night. 

We were still feeling restless, however, and we pulled the almost forgotten mobile phone from our pocket and turned it over in our hands. It hadn’t been waterlogged thanks to the wards we’d carved into the plastic backing, but it registered no signal. We’d expected as much of course, but the fact made us unexpectedly sad. 


	3. Chapter 3

We woke to the smell of fire, and we kept our eyes closed and inhaled. There was another smell on the air, we noticed. 

_A storm is coming_.

I opened my eyes to see if I was in danger of burning alive, and was surprised to see Diaval hunched over a makeshift spit roasting a fish he must have caught in the stream running through the glade. I untied myself from my oh-so-comfortable tree branch and scrambled down, growing frustrated with the unfamiliar contortions necessary for the task and deciding to drop the last ten feet to the ground, to the protest of my knees. Diaval winced in sympathy. 

“Thanks for making breakfast,” I said. “You could have woken me. I could have helped.”

“You know how to spear fish, do you, Londoner?”

“Well no, but I could have cooked the thing.”

“And you know how to do that.”

“It can’t be that hard,” we growled. We were light and life and fire, we were the whisper in the receiver offering mortals a freedom such as they had never known if they would but _come, come be we_ , we raced through the heavens at the speed of light, we were _gods_ of the wire and we were damned if we couldn’t cook a bloody fish!

“It’s fine,” Diaval said, surprised at our outburst. “It’s not just for you anyway. I get tired of scavenging sometimes.” 

“Okay,” I said, sitting down next to him, suddenly tired though I had just woken up from what was probably the most consecutive hours of sleep I’d gotten in weeks. “Sorry.”

“Have some fish,” he said. 

It was not the most appetising thing I’d ever eaten, but it was certainly not the least. It did make me feel better. 

“Your apprentice was right,” Diaval said, packing up the spit for future use.

“She generally is,” I said. “But about what in particular this time?”

“Kind of a git when you haven’t been fed properly.”

I’m sure I would have come up with a brilliant response, something to knock the bird right off his high-and-mighty perch, if a knife hadn’t appeared at his throat the next second, and another at mine a moment later. Suddenly it seemed a bandit had stepped out from behind every tree, and just like that, we were surrounded. 

A few began rifling through our things while the ones that held me and Diaval began going through our pockets. I wondered briefly why Diaval wasn’t changing into something with claws and ripping them to shreds, until I realised that with any change Diaval risked slitting his own throat in the process. I tried desperately to snatch _anything_ of the old and powerful magic of that place, but it was stubborn and buried, and I could not dig it up, let alone find a hold.  

“Where are your valuables?” one of the men asked, stepping forward after the ones going through our bags had turned up nothing of interest. 

“We don’t have any,” Diaval spat.

“Let’s say I believe you,” the bandit said. “Then where are your weapons? Your horses?”

“We don’t. Have any.”

“So you’re telling me that two men are traveling through the hinterlands on foot and entirely unarmed?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a saddle bag over there, isn’t it? So I’ll ask you again, where are your horses?”

“I’ll tell you again, we don’t have any.”

“If that’s true,” the bandit said, drawing a short sword, "then the only things worth taking will be the clothes from your corpses.”

There was no waver of doubt or hesitation in the solemn faces around us – they had killed before, and if we did not produce something of value to them, or perhaps even if we did, they would slit our throats and leave us for dead in the woods. We might still be able to muster a blood curse like we had with Oda's friend from the Order, but it would be of no use to us if all of our blood was spilled. And here, where there were no phone booths, no satellites, no wires to escape into, death would be final. 

“What’s this?” a gruff voice said in my ear, and the man behind me held out my mobile in his palm, upside-down. 

If I said a mobile phone he wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Things like telephones and ATMs and Underground turnstiles had no meaning here. These bandits’ lives were the narrow road and the wide woods, and the greatest danger was the wolves at night. The great old tree that had offered us shelter would just as happily drink up our blood as it filtered down through the earth to its roots, and the wolves would feed our flesh to their pups, and the ancient wheel would turn. Magic is life and life is magic and there was so much life here, it was just _different_. 

But no, it wasn’t.

The tree roots I could feel lacing through the dirt beneath me, thirsty for rain or blood, may just have easily been the network of storm drain pipes beneath the streets, swallowing the filth and refuse of the city when it was all finally washed away by the rain, it made no difference. Both were saturated with meaning, full of life, and therefore, full of magic. Which meant they were mine to control. 

“It’s a hunk of scrap metal,” I said, and I twisted my fingers in the air, and the ground writhed. 

Old, thick roots broke through the surface of the soil, coiling and striking like snakes. The first I sent shooting into the back of the man behind me, and he dropped his knife with a gasp and would have fallen if not for the root impaling him and keeping him upright. The man that had held Diaval was already running when a cry of “Sorcery!” arose from somewhere in the confusion, but none of them would get far.  


Diaval had wisely taken his raven form and was circling above, leaving the field clear. The roots thirsted for blood, and that was what I promised them as I sent them to trip, crush, constrict and impale the fleeing bandits. Screams rose up and sent all of the birds in the canopy but one flapping away in a panic. Silence only came when I opened up the earth and sent the roots plunging home, still carrying their prey. 

I picked up my mobile from the churned earth and cleaned it the best I could of blood and dirt on my sleeve while I waited for Diaval to return. It took a moment. The raven finally landed a ways away from me, and when he became a man, his eyes remained fixed on the ground, either because he was wary of what was beneath it, or because he found it a more appealing option than my eyes. 

“Well that was,” he swallowed, “creative.”

“A storm is coming,” we said.

“What?”

“Erm, did I get all of them?” I asked.

“Every last one.”

“They were going to kill us, Diaval.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that they got what was coming to them. I just might’ve spared myself the sight.” He shuddered. “If I didn’t have to carry your flightless arse across the kingdom, I wouldn't touch the ground for the next month.”

“Let’s just hope we can get back without me having to do that again. I’m not sure how much control I have over this kind of magic.”

Diaval shuddered again. “Why would you tell me that?”

“So you can get out of the way.”

“Oh, _thanks_.” Diaval finally looked up. “So…just like that? You can do classic magic now?”

I shrugged. “A knife at both of our throats was pretty excellent motivation. I wouldn’t say I can do it _well_ , or safely, but I understand the principle.”

“So you did mean both of us and not just you when you said they were going to kill us.”

“That wasn’t clear?”

“I suppose it should have been. And I suppose I should thank you for saving my tail.”

“I should thank you, too.”

“For what? I just stood there,” Diaval said. 

“For putting me in a position where I am now fit to judge the relative worths of classic and urban magic. Classic magic’s shit.”

“That’s not fair!” Diaval spluttered. “You just used it to butcher a bunch of highwaymen, you don’t know how beautiful and elegant it can be. If you’d seen my Mistress use it you would understand.”

“Is there a chance we will see her?”

“I’ve been wondering that myself. I can’t remember the exact year she died, but it was around forty years after Aurora was crowned. There’s a chance. It would be wonderful to see her one last time. And I think you’d like her – she could be a real frustrating punk, too.”

“I’m too old to be a punk,” I objected. 

“She was, too. But everyone seems young to me now.”

“It must be strange to live that long, to see the world really change,” I said. I suspected, though I had spoken of it to no one, that I might not have aged since my resurrection. Perhaps Diaval’s experience would become my own. Though it was likely that, with my job, I would never get the chance to find out.

“It is a little, but mostly I’ve just gotten used to it. You know as a raven I would have had a few decades on this earth if I was very lucky, but then my Mistress found me and I’ve had a few millennia and counting. Most of the time all I think about is the irony that the spell she used on me could never have worked on her.”

“No one has figured out immortality without strings,” we said. “What are yours?”

“As I said, it was an enchantment of eternal servitude. I was entirely hers, down to my physical form. That level of devotion and ownership isn’t possible between two humans – only a human and an animal. Maleficent removed my strings, but the eternity she gave me isn’t something that a human consciousness could survive in tact. We animals are hardier, and our thoughts are more direct. We can dedicate our entire being to another for a lifetime if needs must, but no human is coming out of that still human.”

~

We reached the castle just before sunset. The guards recognised Diaval and let us in without question. It was the first thing that had gone smoothly for us since we’d first met at The Tower a world away. 

Another pair of guards opened the doors to the throne room for us, and we advanced down a long hall, at the end of which a middle-aged woman was seated on a tall throne surrounded by a retinue of smiling, colourfully dressed courtiers. 

The golden-haired queen’s smile surpassed all others, however, when she saw us approaching. “Hello pretty birdie,” she said. 

Diaval bowed low at the foot of the throne. “My Queen,” he said. 

We hated it, but I bowed awkwardly, and the Queen laughed. 

“Oh, rise sillies,” she said. “And Diaval, I keep telling you to call me Aurora.”

“I remember,” he said fondly. “Aurora, might I request a private audience?”

She nodded and stood, addressing the others in the room who had turned to look at us with curiosity. “Everyone, it is late. Time you all head home.”

There were a few murmurs of disappointment, but everyone respectfully heeded the Queen’s veiled order and filed out after wishing her farewell. 

“Please allow Frederick to show you to the available guest rooms, and I shall change out of these ridiculous robes. Come find me in my chambers when you two have settled in.”

“Thank you my Q— Aurora,” Diaval said with another bow.

“Anything for my pretty birdie.”

One of the guards – Frederick, presumably – stepped forward and led us out of the throne room up to the third floor. He gave us the keys to two rooms across the hall from each other, and left us alone when Diaval said that we needed nothing more. 

“Get cleaned up,” Diaval said, opening his door. “I’ll come over as soon as I’ve done the same.”

"Yes, pretty birdie."

He gave me a vengeful look before closing the door behind him. It was entirely worth it. 

Then we were alone. We briefly scanned the room we’d been given, and our eyes stopped at the enormous four-poster bed, decked out with just short of a dozen pillows. It looked absolutely heavenly, and we were tempted to collapse across it then and sleep until all our problems went away. But ours were seldom the kind of problems solved by time and a good night’s rest, and we had a private audience with the Queen. 

There were two basins of steaming water in the bathroom next to a bronze bathtub. The idea seemed simple enough, and we poured both basins into the bathtub, followed by large amounts of various soaps and oils chosen at random from the array on the ledge above the tub. Once I’d eased into the hot water, I began to scrub away at the worst of the travel grime, and soon enough I felt as presentable to a monarch as I ever would. 

I was pulling my boots back on when there was a knock at the door. I opened it and Diaval walked in, his hair still wet like my own, the iridescent feathers in it shining. We remembered running our fingers through his feathery pelt while he was a horse, and it was thanks only to my realisation of how weird that would be to do to another human that we didn’t reach out and pet Diaval. 

“Hell of a lot better than a tree branch, huh?” he said. 

“Much,” we said. “So, just to be clear, Queen Aurora…is Sleeping Beauty.”

“Yeah, although the real one’s much less of a doe-eyed damsel than she’s been made out to be in the stories. She was always a strong and capable ruler, with and without King Phillip.” 

“How did the King die?”

“His appendix went. Welcome to the first century.”

We clutched our side protectively. “I never thought anything could make me miss Dr Seah so much.”

“You ready to meet the Queen?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“We can trust her,” Diaval said. “No matter what, just be honest.”

The Queen welcomed us into her chambers with the same bright cheer that she had displayed among her courtiers, and I was beginning to think that it was actually genuine. She sat cross-legged on her bed like a little girl would, but somehow she still projected power and dignity. 

“Diaval and I have been friends since I was a baby,” she said with a fond smile, “but I do not know you, sir…?”

“My name is Matthew Swift.”

“That’s a lovely name. I hope you don’t mind my asking, but are you a fairy, Matthew? I have a lot of friends in the Moors, but I don’t think I’ve heard of you.”

Diaval had said to be honest. “I’m a sorcerer, actually.”

“Oh my, a real life sorcerer! I’ve only recently heard the rumours about your kind. My people are scared of sorcerers. I don’t know why.”

“We can be dangerous,” I said. 

“Anything can be dangerous,” she said. “What matters are one’s intentions. Take Diaval for example. He can be incredibly dangerous, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly if he could help it. Unless he’s very hungry.”

“That was one time,” Diaval complained.

“I’m sorry, pretty birdie, you’re just so easy to tease,” she chuckled. “So, Mr Swift, where are you from?”

Honesty. “About two thousand years in the future, or so I’ve been told.” 

The Queen paled. “Oh. I suppose I should have started by asking why you’re here.”

Diaval explained roughly our experience in the last thirty-six hours, leaving out only the unnecessary details that might confuse the Queen more than enlighten her. 

“Well…you two have certainly had an exciting last few days.”  She seemed to be taking it surprisingly well.  “My condolences that you have been taken so far from home, Mr Swift.”

“Thank you, my Queen.”

“Well, I’m not your Queen, am I? So I suppose you should call me Aurora as well.”

“Thank you…Aurora.”

“Now then, Diaval, you said you felt drawn to the castle?”

“Yes… Although now that I’m here I’ve realised that’s not quite right. It’s somewhere near here, but to the east, I think. Has anything happened recently in the kingdom that might have involved powerful magic?”

“Not that I know of, and I should certainly hope I would know about it. I don’t pay my knights in grain, after all.” 

“Is my Mistress…here?” Diaval asked. “She might be able to help us learn more about this magic.”

“It did surprise me, when I first saw you in the Hall, that you were back so soon. You – or _this_ time’s you – just left with fairy godmother yesterday to gather ingredients in the enchanted caves to the…east. Diaval, what happened in those caves?”

A look of sadness had come over Diaval. “I’m sorry, Aurora, but I must honour my Mistress’ wishes even now. All I can say now is that what she wanted in those caves was of no danger to the kingdom, and that she only wanted to protect you, as always. The Diaval of this time should return in a day or two, and he will tell you everything.”

“I… I trust you, Diaval. And I trust Maleficent. I’m guessing you’ll want fresh supplies for the journey to the caves.”

“Thank you, Aurora,” Diaval said. “Seeing you again after so long has been a privilege that I am not sure what I did to deserve.”

“Oh pretty birdie,” she sighed, tears welling in the corners of her eyes, “you deserve the world. You just don’t know it.”

Diaval bowed.

“I shall have your supplies ready first thing in the morning. I would offer you a horse as well so that Diaval doesn’t tire himself out before you two get there, but I’m guessing the beast would smell Mr Swift’s fear.”

Diaval chuckled. We were glad everyone found it so funny.

“In the meantime,” she continued, “I’ve ordered food sent to both of your rooms. You must be hungry and tired from your travels. Please get some rest. And if you should need anything else, you have my full hospitality while you’re here.”

“Thank you, Aurora,” Diaval said, kissing her hand.

“Keep her safe, pretty birdie,” she said, pulling him into a fierce hug.

“I shall do my best,” he said. 

Then, surprisingly, she hugged us too. “And don’t let Diaval do anything stupidly brave.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

We wished the Queen goodnight and walked back to our rooms in silence. The halls were empty.

“Matthew,” Diaval said, his hand on his door, "about the caves...” 

“What couldn’t you tell the Queen who we were supposed to be entirely honest with?” I asked.

“They aren’t just enchanted,” he said. “They were a sacred place to the old races of fairies. It was where they would hold rites to commend the spirits of the dead to the realm beyond. My Mistress went there to die.”

_ A storm is coming.  _


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my defense, I did say “mostly.”

A loud _caw_ in close proximity to my face jolted me from sleep, and I opened my eyes to see a raven perched on my chest, staring at me with its head cocked to one side.  

“Diaval, how many times do you need reminding that people don’t speak raven?” I groaned. 

He changed back into a man, and in all honesty I didn’t even notice how…different that made our position at first. 

“I remembered this time,” he said, crouching over me and grinning. “I just said ‘wake up’.”

“Does the Queen know how much of a menace her pretty birdie is?” I asked. 

“You call me ‘pretty birdie’ one more time and you’ll regret it. Only Aurora can call me that.”

“Sounds like an empty threat to us,” we said. 

Diaval narrowed his eyes. “I don’t make empty threats.”

“Oh? Then what are you going to do to us, pretty birdie?”

I was quite surprised when he leaned down and kissed me. But not nearly as surprised as when I started kissing back. 

“Um,” Diaval said after a minute.

“Huh…” I said. “I guess you do make empty threats.”

“W-what?”

“You said you would make me regret it. I don’t.”

“You smooth _bastard_ ,” he said. 

“That’s something we’ve never been accused of being before. Well, the first part anyway.”

“Can’t imagine why,” he said in a shaky monotone, still in as surprised as I was at the latest turn of events.

“Anyway,” I said, employing my well-practiced skill of putting a new mess on the back burner to let simmer while I dealt with the bigger messes on the front burners, “no time to mess about in bed. Your Mistress is dying in a cave, a storm is coming, and we have to get home across thousands of years and I’m guessing about two-hundred kilometres at this point. Come on.”

I pulled him up off the bed, and he spluttered for a moment but, finding nothing coherent to say, fell silent and followed me out the door. 

The Queen was in an important meeting with her advisors, and Diaval seemed surprisingly relieved to hear the news. 

At my inquiring look, he explained, “The more time I spend with her, the harder it will be to leave. We’ve said our goodbyes twice now. That's more than most people get.”

“That’s assuming we _can_ leave,” I said.

“Yes, assuming.”

We left it at that. The guards at the gates had our supplies ready for us, as Aurora had promised, and barely batted an eyelash when Diaval turned into a horse right in front of them. I wished he had waited, because this way it meant I had an audience to my struggles as I climbed awkwardly into the saddle. To their credit, the guards didn’t laugh. But I thought I heard a suspicious snrking sound from inside one of their helmets at my first abortive attempt. I made it on the second and was, for the first time, relieved when Diaval shot off at a gallop. 

It was, apparently, a few hours’ ride to the enchanted caves, which left me with plenty of time to think about…things. Which I stubbornly refused to use. Instead I practiced making a flower bloom and curl into a bud again in my palm until I could do it with almost as little thought as it took to hurl a bolt of electricity. Diaval didn’t seem worried, but we did not know what we would find in those caves, and perhaps, through some dumb, bizarre twist of classic magic, making a little flower bloom on command would be more useful than a powerful surge of crackling electricity. 

It was only midmorning, but the sky was darkening on the eastern horizon as we rode toward it. 

_A storm is coming_. 

~

I stared up at the rocky cliff face and the mouth of the cave just visible some thirty metres above. I continued to stare. 

“How did Maleficent make it up there if she was dying?” I asked.

“She flew,” Diaval said.

“Right. Fairies,” I said. 

“Over here,” Diaval motioned to the left side of the cliff face. “Some human explorer came along a few hundred years ago and carved handholds into the rock up this way. You can use those. I’ll be with you the whole way, but, y’know, flying.”

“That’s…kind.”

“Someone has to herald your death in town if you fall,” he said. 

We glared.

“Hey, did you know that a lot of cultures considered ravens an omen of death? Funny creatures, humans.”

With that he transformed and took off with an echoing _caw_. He perched on a ledge a few metres up and looked down at us. We glared harder, and then focused very intently on the handholds as we began to climb. 

We had undertaken more arduous tasks, certainly. Our wealth of unpleasant experience did not make the climb any less unpleasant. Every time I reached close to where Diaval was perched, he would take off and wait for me a few metres higher up. We repeated the routine nearly a dozen times before Diaval reached the entrance and flew inside. I followed a few minutes after.

“That wan’t so bad, was it?” he asked, though he was looking around distractedly. The cracks in the walls were glowing a pale bluish green that pulsed almost like breath, or a heartbeat, and if Diaval’s fascination with the phenomenon was any indication, this seemed to be a new development. 

I tried to speak, and wheezed instead. He gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. 

“I left my Mistress in the heart of the cave. Down this way.”

As I followed I asked, “You left her?”

“She asked me to, as her final request. She wanted to spare me as she had Aurora. And she had to take the last step alone.”  I couldn’t see his face as he spoke. 

“Is this where the calling is coming from?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said. “It’s quite strong now.”

“Diaval.” He must have at least considered it by now. “Do you think she's the one doing all of this?”

“I don’t know. But if it is, she has a good reason.”

His tone made it clear he wasn’t willing to entertain other possibilities. We kept silent until Diaval said, “this is it – the centre of the caves. I left her…there.”

He crossed to a large stone slab rising from a luminescent pool in the centre of the dripping, high-ceilinged cavern. There was nothing there. 

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I should have left her only three days ago, and the way I remember it, she wasn’t in any shape to go for a stroll through the caverns.”

I tried manipulating the rock around me experimentally, and a few pebbles rose to orbit my fingers. If I had to, I might be able to collapse part of the cave. 

“Mistress Maleficent?” Diaval called. His voice echoed a long ways down the tunnels that converged to our current location. “Mistress!” he called again. 

“…Diaval?” 


	5. Chapter 5

The voice was strangely gravelly but feminine, and seemed at first to echo from one tunnel, then another, until it sounded as if it was coming from all around us. “I knew you would come. I’ve been calling for so long. I made a mistake telling you to go. We can do so much more together… Who have you brought with you?”

Diaval was still looking around frantically trying to find the source of the voice while we stood uneasily still. “Mistress, you were calling to me, and just about every other mystical creature around, in the _twenty-first century_. You pulled me back through time, and him along with me.” 

“The twenty-first century? How exciting. I must not yet know my own strength.”

“What do you mean? What happened here? He’s a sorcerer, Mistress. Tell us what’s wrong, and maybe we can help you.”

“A sorcerer? You mean a human practitioner of magic. An abomination.”

“Mistress, what’s happened to you?” Diaval pleaded. “The person I followed willingly into war would never think that way.”

There was a deep inhalation of breath, and the lights in the cave dimmed, then flared to new life with the sound of the exhale. “The person you followed into war was weak, and it was nearly her downfall. The person you left in these caves was a shadow even of her. But now I feel strong again – stronger than I ever was. These caves are the thinnest point in the veil between this realm and the next, and as I hung between the two, I saw the truth of the future. They take over, Diaval. We do not live in harmony. There are barely any of us left. The humans take everything – they build over the old places and snuff out magic wherever it is found. They must be stopped before they can begin.”

“No, Mistress, that’s _not_ the truth,” Diaval shouted into the dimness. “I’ve lived that future. Your people aren’t gone, they’ve simply changed, just as magic has. I’ve seen the new, urban magic firsthand, and it’s…beautiful.”

“Perhaps you have spent too much time among humans,” the voice resounded. “If you will not help me, then you may leave. I released you from your debt to me three days ago, and I will not go back on my word. I have all of the help I need.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The old races, the ones who showed me these visions. They offered me the power to make sure they never come true. I accepted.”

“What did you do?” I demanded.

Her tone went strangely flat. “They live again, within me. Within…us.”

“Not you, too,” Diaval muttered. We tried not to be offended. “Snap out of it, Maleficent! You’ve been deceived. They’re _using_ you, can’t you see?”

“For the first time,” she said, and all the lights in the cave blinked out, “we truly do see.” All the lights but two glowing, bluish green eyes the size of dinner plates, their pupils slits, staring at us from the tunnel opposite.

I grabbed Diaval’s hand in the darkness and pulled him into the nearest tunnel as the dragon lunged. I threw up a wall of stone to block the entrance, but from the receding hiss of scales on stone she hadn’t even bothered to chase us. She was heading for the exit. 

Diaval hissed in the darkness, “We have to help her before she does something she can’t forgive herself fo– Christ, Matthew, your eyes! Don’t tell me you’re affected by this place, too.”

“No, they always do that in the dark,” I said. “Any ideas how to help a genocidal dragon?”

“She’s still Maleficent,” he said fiercely. “She can pull herself out of this. She may just need a little help this time. First, we need to find our way out of here as fast as possible.”

“Alright,” I said, bringing down the stone wall, “you lead, I’ll follow.” 

Diaval took a few eager steps and I stopped him. I thought of flint dragging and cracking against dry stone, combustion, sparks, and the ancient trust man has placed in fire since he was first able to harness it – as both a weapon of war and a weapon against the darkness. Orange flames sprang to my fingertips and began to lick cautiously at the stale oxygen in the air, warm, but not burning. The fire cast enough light ahead of us to reveal a seemingly bottomless crevasse; Maleficent must have collapsed that part of the floor on her way out. Diaval was standing at the edge of it.

"Mind the gap," we said, and his face turned pale in the orange glow.

We both crept around the narrow edge of the crevasse, and when we reached the other side, I suggested that perhaps I had better lead for this part. Then, because the fire was proving unpredictable and difficult to control, I let it gutter out. After all, _we_  could see just fine. 

We took Diaval’s hand and ran through the darkness, navigating the passages through which we’d come, back to the entrance of the caves. When we burst out into the day and our eyes began to readjust to the light, we could make out the shape of a great dragon with scales the colour of heavy twilight winging its way quickly into the distance. It was flying west, in the direction of the castle town. 

“How are we supposed to catch up to her, let alone stop her?” I asked.

“Have you forgotten the moral of the story?” Diaval responded. “I was the fucking dragon.”

He leapt off the cliff face, and seconds later came the heavy beat of enormous wings, and another dragon black as shadows rose to dig its claws into the rock of the cliff face. It stared at me with moon-yellow eyes and gave an impatient growl, at which I promptly – against every instinct – approached and began clambering up its outstretched leg to settle in the space between its wings and shoulder blades. 

As soon as I had a hold of one of the ridges on its back it pushed off of the cliff, and we were falling, and if the horse ride had been bad then this was so much worse, and we were falling, but I had adrenaline pumping through my veins and purpose spiked through my fear, and a storm was coming, and we were falling, and it was nothing compared to soaring through the atmosphere on electric wings at the speed of information, and we were falling, and we were free, and we were falling, and then, with a powerful sweep of wings, we were flying. 

I knew there were thousands of people in danger below, but still we laughed at the thrill of it, and Diaval roared. 

Maleficent roared back, and Diaval barely dodged the fireball that suddenly came hurtling towards us. 

“We do not want to hurt you, old friend,” came that voice again on the air. “Turn away and allow us to save our people from the threat of humanity.”

Diaval answered with a fireball of his own, but it was clearly a warning shot. 

“We do not want to hurt you,” Maleficent said, “but if we have to, we shall.”

She banked just as the spires of the castle rose on the grey horizon, and shot a stream of blue-tinged fire back along our flightpath. Diaval beat his wings hard, and the fire dissipated in the sudden gale, though the air around us heated up quickly. He lashed out with the club of his tail as Maleficent passed underneath, and managed to draw blood at the side of her neck. But she tucked her wings in and rolled so she could rake her claws along Diaval’s belly. 

They came back around at each other in tight arcs, and met in a clash of teeth and claws, scratching and snapping as they began to plummet to earth. Maleficent’s eyes fixed on me, and her mouth began to glow orange-blue behind her teeth as another firestorm caught and raged in her chest. Diaval broke free and shot a blast of fire into Maleficent’s own just in time to save me from incineration. 

Diaval’s body was hashed with deep lacerations, his breathing laboured, and he seemed to be favouring one wing over the other. Maleficent was in only slightly better shape. I could tell he was holding back, and perhaps she was too, but at this rate they were going to kill each other – and, incidentally, me.

The sky had darkened above us, and if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought that night was coming on. The black clouds rumbled louder than any dragon, and flashed like bombs were exploding inside them. This was the vast, unbridled power of nature before it ever began to bend under concrete and asphalt. We could _taste_ the potential on the air, and then the first bolt of lightning cracked by us and struck the ground below. Lightning – _electricity_ – we understood perfectly. It was wild and unpredictable and powerful, and so were we.

“The storm is here,” we said, and dove off of Diaval’s back. 

We could feel the charged links between earth and sky, and with them we pulled the lightning down from the heavens. It came eagerly, as if racing along circuits, but the circuits were our nerves, our neurons, our synapses, and when they came close to overload, in the power surge we spread our wings. 

The dragon the colour of the bruised purple clouds was just below us, and it could not fly nor summon its feeble fire fast enough to escape from the lightning that sparked and shot from our fingertips. 

The dragon screamed and fell, crashing and ripping up the field below like a meteor. We followed, landing on our feet, and we could have fried the creature like old circuitry, or stopped the weak, electrical pulses of its heart, but I kept these as last resorts, and instead we cast a cage of lightning over it that it dared not test. Perhaps it could not if it tried, for it was broken from the fall, and the earth was drinking up its blood. 

Another dragon landed beside us, and then it was a man, and then the man’s hand was on our shoulder. He did not pull back at the electric shock. 

“Matthew?” he said. “Are you…okay?”

“We said to the storm, ‘come be we’, and the storm accepted.”

“Um,” he said. 

“We are fine,” we said. 

The man nodded, and approached the dragon in our cage. It bared its teeth to show the warning glow of flames, but it did not unleash them. 

“Maleficent,” the man said, “isn’t this sorcerer proof enough that magic is very much alive and thriving in the new world?”

“That man is no mere sorcerer,” the dragon said – with its mind, we realised, instead of its mouth. 

“You’re right,” the man said, “he’s also a new form of magical life, born of the interactions between humans and machines. Magic still saturates the future we come from, just in different forms. And the fairies have adapted to this future, many also taking new forms, but they have not forgotten their people’s history in enchanted forests and caves like the ones of this kingdom.”

“The old fairies would not lie to one of their own,” the dragon said. 

“Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they are simply too chained to the past to see that change is seldom erasure of what came before.”

Just then, a dozen of the Queen’s knights came riding up to us, and at their head was the Queen herself. 

“Diaval,” she said, dismounting and taking in the scene, “my watchers saw dragons fighting – what's happened?” She sounded curiously drained of the energy to keep up official pretenses. 

“And where is the second dragon?” the knight at her right asked, looking skyward. 

Diaval sheepishly raised his hand. 

“Oh,” the knight said, “my apologies, Lord Diaval.”

“No problem, mate,” Diaval said, at which the knight looked briefly confused. “My Queen,” Diaval said, “Matthew and I have the threat taken care of. I suggest you return to the castle and —“

“Aurora?” The dragon’s voice wavered, weak. 

The Queen looked startled, but she approached the lightning cage. “F-fairy godmother?”

“We…I have made a terrible mistake,” said the dragon, its eyes drifting closed from emotion and exhaustion, or perhaps to avoid meeting the eyes of the Queen.

“I don’t understand,” said the Queen. “Diaval just told me back at the castle that you were dead. How… Why?”

“I’m sorry, Aurora, I never knew about this until now,” Diaval said. “Maleficent was… _misled_ by the spirits of the old fairies. They made her believe that humans would destroy all magic and magical creatures, and that she must prevent that future at any cost.”

“But…I would never let that happen, Maleficent,” the Queen said, tears rising in her eyes. 

“I know,” the dragon said, almost an exhale, “and I am so sorry.”

“Matthew,” the Queen said fiercely, “is this cage still necessary?”

We started and quickly allowed the electricity to slither away into the air. Our wings flickered. 

The Queen approached the dragon and put a hand cautiously, gently, on its muzzle. It exhaled shakily and the Queen collapsed over it and began shaking with sobs. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said finally. “I still love you, fairy godmother. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“I love you so much, Aurora,” the dragon whispered, “and you make an excellent Queen, for all in your kingdom. I don’t know how I ever lost sight of those things.”

The Queen hugged the dragon tighter, and it rumbled, non-threateningly, warmly, low in its throat. 

“Before I leave this world, as I was meant to some time ago,” the dragon said after a long moment, “I can return the two of you home. Go quickly; I won’t be able to keep the way open long.”

With a slash of its tail, the dragon seemed to rip through the fabric of time, and on the other side we could see a field crossed by telephone lines, with suburbs and further, the city of London, unmistakable, in the distance. If we hadn’t already been a little teary, that sight would have set us off. 

Diaval turned as he was about to step through the portal behind us, and mumbled what sounded like “should never have left her.” Then he said to us, “I’m sorry, Matthew, but I think…I should stay. I’ll catch up with you the long way ‘round.” He shoved us the rest of the way through the portal, and it closed behind us with a quiet ‘pop’.

I found myself alone in the vast field, the grey skies of England hanging low above the land. I began to follow the telephone lines back into the city, and I never felt more lost while knowing exactly where I was going. 


	6. Chapter 6

On the bus just outside of Hackney, my mobile rang. It was Kelly. 

“Mr Mayor, we have been trying to contact you for the last two hours, are you alright? Where are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m in Hackney. There was time travel involved, but we took care of the problem – there’s no need for further investigation.”

“Time travel? Mr Mayor, you know the Aldermen will have to look into that, in spite of your no doubt well-founded assurances. Now, when you say ‘we’, do you mean you and the raven, Diaval? Is he with you?”

“Is Penny OK?” I asked. 

“Yes, your apprentice is just fine. We got to her quickly, but she had already lured the manticore out to the street and trapped it by liquefying the concrete beneath its feet. A team is working on a relocation plan for the creature as we speak. Now I must ask that you return to the Tower and tell us what happened in as much detail as possible, Mr Mayor. I saved a few sandwiches for you to choose from if you missed lunch.”

“You’re back at the Tower?”

“Yes, the holding facilities here are quite appropriate for testy chimera.”

“Thank you, Kelly. I’ll be there soon.”

“Mr Mayor. Are you OK?”

“I told you, I’m fine. Not dead, cursed, vomiting river sludge or in a magical coma. Not even one broken bone. It might be a record.”

“That’s all very good to hear,” Kelly said, “but not quite what I meant.”

“I know.”

~

We walked past Kelly’s sign and into the Tower courtyard. We knew Penny and Kelly and the rest of the Aldermen were waiting for us inside on the lower level, but I took a minute to compose my thoughts and figure out where on earth I would begin retelling what had happened to me these past three days/ two hours. I realised I was staring at one of the Tower ravens, and it was staring back. 

We said to the bird, “It would be nice if you would help us explain to the Aldermen what happened so they don’t think we’ve gone insane. Again. And…it would just be nice to see you again. I think…I miss you.”

I turned to go inside when another raven landed on the short stone wall in front of me. And then it was a man sitting there – a man with black eyes, black, feathery hair, and a long, iridescent black coat. 

“I think you’ve got the wrong raven, mate,” Diaval said. “Unless you and Kyrrl have a history that I don't know about.”

The other raven _cawed_ and hopped away. It was more of a reaction than we could manage. 

“Aw, come on,” Diaval said, frowning, “you said you missed me, right? So why are you just staring? I’m getting a little self-conscious here.”

“Did you wait…another two thousand years?” I managed. 

“Well after the first thousand, the rest aren’t such a big deal— Wait, no, I didn’t _wait_ two more millennia just for _you_ , Mr High-Opinion-of-Himself. I got to help Aurora after my Mistress’ death, and she even offered to make me King, but I said she was doing just fine herself, and that there would be more than enough silly old carrion-eaters in government in the future. I got a whole second chance at my life. I payed more attention to the major events in human history, I avoided the things I regretted doing, though it helped that I was also avoiding my younger self, and he was doing those things of course. Weird, that. I tried new things, saw the world, helped some good people in bad situations. Then back in London I saw you as a kid with your gran feeding pigeons – I hope that’s not creepy. Later, I saw you die. That was…difficult to watch, and after the first year I was seriously doubting whether I’d done the right thing, just watching. But you’d still had brown eyes then, and I knew about as much as you did about how to fight shadows. And then another year later you burst out of your old flat in mismatched clothes with pretty blue eyes looking terribly confused, and since then you’ve — well, actually you’ve had quite a rough time of things, sorry mate — but you’ve pulled through the worst every time. It’s kind of inspiring, really. In a cringey way.”

“That…sounds about right,” we said.

“You alright, Matthew? You’re still kind of doing the staring thing.”

“We…I…thought you’d gone.”

“I said I would catch up with you, didn’t I?” Diaval said, pushing off the wall. “I don’t make empty promises either.”

I was about to just kiss the bloody bird when Kelly and Penny came up the stairs, chatting, out into the courtyard. Their conversation stopped when Diaval kissed me instead. We flailed for a moment, panicky and embarrassed, but finally gave up and reciprocated fiercely, giving a warning growl that was meant to convey that now was really not the time, but I could see in immediate retrospect how the message might have been confused. 

Diaval finally relented when Penny whistled, and Kelly began to applaud. 

“Not a word,” I snapped at them. 

“I was only going to ask what on earth you’re wearing, Matthew,” Penny said. “I’m sorry if my comment about your sense of fashion earlier got to you more than I realised, but that is not the way to go about improving the situation.”

“He’s dressed quite appropriately for the time period we were in,” Diaval defended. “But I shall see what I can do for him in this century as well.”

“Yes, about the time traveling,” Kelly began.

“I don’t see how I’m any better off taking fashion advice from a bird,” I complained.

“It is a difficult position to reach, but somehow you’ve done it,” Penny said. 

“I at least owe you a new coat,” Diaval said, “since you had to leave your old one in the Moors.”

We considered this. “Nothing with feathers on,” I decided. “I’d still like to look _somewhat_ intimidating and authoritative.”

“Oi, feathers can be intimidating!” Diaval objected. “I’ve pecked people’s eyes out with feathers on.”

“I’ve experienced worse. Though I’ll give you that blindness is not a fun thing I’d like to repeat. Plus we’ve been told we have pretty eyes.”

“By who?” Penny interjected. “Fuckin’ creepy is what they are – every time I run into you around a corner at night I have to remind myself not to scream. Though they must be fun at parties…”

“Parties,” we repeated. 

“Oh yeah, Matthew’s not what you’d call a social butterfly, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Penny informed Diaval.

“I might have guessed,” Diaval said. 

“The reason I don’t have friends is because everyone I meet tries to kill me,” I said. “Even you!”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t really conscious of it, was I,” Penny said. 

“And Kelly,” I said.

“I never–!” Kelly began, but stopped herself. “Oh no, you’re quite right. But that was before the Aldermen accepted you as the new Midnight Mayor. I haven’t tried to kill you since!”

“Congratulations, you may have set the record,” we said. “We’ll buy you fish n’ chips sometime.”

“Have you ever thought about what that says about you, though?” Penny asked. “That everyone you meet tries to kill you, I mean.”

“Penny, it’s an apprentice’s job to always back her teacher up in arguments,” I said. 

“You just made that up,” she said. 

“No, Bakker said the same thing to me when I was his apprentice.”

“Do you really wanna follow _Bakker’s_ example? He had you eviscerated, didn’t he?”

“While under the sway of a powerful mystical being,” I said meekly. 

“Well you’re sort of also under the sway of a powerful mystical being. I say we end the cycle here.”

“I haven’t tried to kill you yet,” Diaval offered. 

“You’re invited to fish n’ chips with me and Kelly, then. Penny’s still not invited.”

“Well in that case I wouldn’t want to impose,” Kelly said.

We shot her a warning glare. 

“Now about all this time travel business,” she changed the subject, and we almost would have preferred if she hadn’t. “If you’ll come with me, Mr Mayor, Mr Diaval.”

She turned and began to lead the way in a way that there was really no arguing with. Down in the dungeons, there was furious roaring coming from down one of the hallways. Kelly asked Penny to assist in getting one of the cells set up as an interview room, and Diaval and I were left alone in the hall. I suspected that was just as Kelly intended. 

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Diaval asked me. “I’ve had a couple thousand years to deal with everything that happened those few days, but for you it’s only been, what, a couple of hours?”

“I’m fine, really,” I said, wondering why everyone kept asking me that. “Do I seem not fine?”

“I dunno, you just seem a little…out of sorts.”

“I suppose I could empathise with Maleficent somewhat,” I said. “Not about the whole ‘magic is dead’ thing, but I know the feeling when the world seems to be slipping out of your grasp. A lot changed in the two years I was gone.”

Diaval put a hand on my shoulder and looked as if he was about to say something incredibly heartfelt and encouraging, and said instead, “You’re not going to turn yourself into a dragon, are you?”

Surprisingly, we chuckled. “That would be ridiculous,” we said. “Far too many people turning into dragons.”

“What was that?” Kelly called form inside the cell.

“Nothing,” I called back. “Go on preparing the torture– I mean interrogation chamber.”

“ _Interview_ chamber,” she corrected. I heard Penny cackle evilly. 

“Erm…” I continued, turning back to Diaval, “Would you like a job? I think I can offer those.”

Kelly probably thought we didn’t notice when she peeked through the bars again, and she probably thought we didn’t hear her when she whispered to Penny, _“I wonder what they’re talking about.”_

Penny barely bothered to whisper when she replied, _“I dunno, but Matthew’s_ smiling _. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do that before, except in that kind of manic way when he knows there’s a less than 50% chance he’s going to survive whatever he’s about to do next.”_

“A job?” Diaval asked, surprised. 

“As our familiar. You’ve certainly gotten us out of a few scrapes these past few days, and we generally try to avoid scrapes. Although no one would believe you if you told them we said that.”

“I’d love to,” Diaval said, “but…”

“But?” we asked. 

“Are you sure a familiar isn’t too classic magic for you?” he grinned. 

“We’re learning to see its merits,” we grudgingly admitted. 

“Then you’ve got yourself a familiar!” Diaval said, holding out his hand.

We shook it, rather surprised he’d agreed having seen the kind of messes we tended to get into, and barely get out of.

“The torture— oh shoot, I mean _interview_ chamber is ready, gentlemen,” Kelly called. 

Diaval and I exchanged nervous glances before stepping behind bars with my PA and my apprentice. 

“Y'know, if a familiar’s what you wanna call it,” Penny said, “that’s fine with me. It’s fitting, actually – you two really are quite _familiar_.”

We grimaced and the lights flickered. 

“Now Mr Mayor,” Kelly said, sitting on one side of a fold-out desk with an empty chair across from her and a microphone in between, “if you would please calm down, take a seat, and start from the beginning of the events that occurred after you and the raven Diaval disappeared through that portal in Hyde Park, we can get this unpleasantness over with as quickly as possible. Like a plaster, Mr Mayor.”

“Fine,” we said, sitting down at the desk. “You know Sleeping Beauty?”

“The story?” Kelly asked.

“The true story,” we said. 

**Author's Note:**

> Why do my fanfics turn out so long and involved??? This was supposed to be crack damn it!
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading! If you enjoyed my writing, you can commission a story from me here: http://museicbox.tumblr.com/commissions


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